Koban 4: Shattered Worlds

by Stephen W Bennett

  “Sure. I haven’t played rock rat for over a year, and I have some payback to make for the arm I had to regrow.”

  When Caldwell turned back to them, they explained what they wanted to do.

  “OK. I can give your suits the Identification Friend from Foe codes to authorize you to be there, and give you the right to request assistance, provided any field commander you are dealing with is able to lend you help. There are spec ops in those mountains with full mods like yours, but as usual, Henry and I don’t know exactly what sort of mischief they are up to, only that it will help us and hurt the Krall.”

  “Thanks Howard, we’ll mostly stay out of your people’s way, and try to link up with a spec ops unit.”

  “Fine. Get your feet wet, but understand that if the Krall can block the mountain passes you will be entirely on your own. In your IFF code, I’ll list you as a full colonel, and both of you as attached to Nabarone’s Headquarters staff. Don’t expect any pay or uniform allowance.”

  “Understood. We’ll pick up our armor from our billets, and borrow a shuttle and pilot if that’s OK.”

  “Of course. I didn’t expect you to walk.”

  ****

  Gofdar, the Mordo clan sub leader that Gatlek Pendor had assigned this mission, had mixed feelings. He was eager to lead two hands of clanships, each loaded with two thousand twenty four experienced and elevated status warriors, to attack the rear and flanks of many times their number of enemy. However, he might miss the launch of the new invasion fleet to the yet unnamed new human world. It was known only that it would be what humans called a Hub world, heavily populated, and largely unprepared for an invasion.

  The number of early and easy kills on such a world could increase your status rapidly, but an experienced warrior, like Gofdar, relished combat with armed and resisting human forces, like those they had engaged here on Poldark. These soldiers would know there could be no surrender or retreat, and no escape when Gofdar’s clanships blocked their mountain pass exits. It would be fight and die. Not fight or die, since not dying wasn’t to be an option for them. The Gatlek wanted as complete a slaughter as possible of this part of the largest army, of the eight armies presently engaged with them.

  The quality of a few hands of kills was often more satisfying than mere quantity, such as sixty-four kills of panicked untrained humans, old and young. Humans with weapons and armor always fought to the best of their limited ability when trapped.

  Gofdar recalled at least two hands of such fights in his two full orbits spent on this world. One such favorite fight had been when the octet he led (before his later promotions) stumbled on ten unusual humans with soft flexible armor that hid them well. Under that flexible stealth armor, they all had worn black suits that made them much stronger than the typical human.

  Anticipating being discovered, they were ready. They knew Krall armor’s weak points, and fired their weapons without hesitation, and more accurately than most soldiers did, hitting the joints and faceplates of the older style armor. He lost two of his octet outright, with another three wounded, one of them himself. He suffered a facial wound when his faceplate shattered from a bullet intended to enter his left eye. The human that shot at him lacked only the speed needed to drive his blade home through the opened helmet, when his projectile weapon emptied. Gofdar caught the hand and removed the weapon, a mere finger’s thickness from his muzzle. He killed his attacker with a slash that nearly decapitated him, sorry an instant later for his impetuous instinctive move. He would have offered a knife fight without armor, had he thought of that in time.

  The sub leader still carried that ultra-sharp blade. He had used it to good effect on several captured humans, and twice in death challenges from warriors from other clans. He hoped he could face another ten humans like that today. If he had to miss the invasion force launch, he was certainly going to lead his warriors into this fight.

  His eight ships were going to land in the larger passages leading away from the higher peaks, and block the main routes out of the far side of the low mountain range, where the bulk of the human force from Novi Sad was headed. He didn’t know how close to exiting the mountains the human army was, because Gofdar left before there was any surveillance to tell him. He had simply sent his ships to the ends of the eight mountain passes most likely to be used for the retreat.

  This blocking tactic was one the Krall used sometimes in interclan wars and against previous alien races, but had not been used against humans because they normally stayed to defend any of their territory. This was the first time they had yielded so swiftly.

  The Tor Gatrol wanted massive human casualties from the human warrior class, as penalty for human raids on Krall worlds. The next two invasions of human worlds were also to be demonstrations of how futile that effort had been, by not slowing the course of the war.

  “Seekers have been launched, my leader.” That was spoken by his weapons master. His pilot, seeing the same sensor data had instantly started evasive maneuvers, jolting the crew on the bridge as they held to the support posts at their stations. The pilot lowered their altitude to below the higher peaks, as they threaded their way through mountain passes toward the intended landing point. All eight clanships were on their own for now, responsible for their own defense and evasion, ordered to reach the eastern ends of the canyons, to block them.

  These seeker missiles would initially home on the detectable atmospheric turbulence trails that formed in the wake of stealthed, fast moving craft. Once close enough, the seekers could follow the plasma trail of thrusters, unless the clanship was using tachyon power to operate their Normal Space reactionless drive. That untraceable gravity drive wasn’t an option for this flotilla to use. That was because the clanships had all originated deep in Poldark’s gravity well, where the large trap fields needed for gravity control were unable to form properly, or maintain the required curvature to capture high-energy tachyons to tap for gravity and inertial control. The seeker missiles, if they closed in on the turbulence tracks, would “sniff” the ions in the plasma trails, and follow the radar invisible ships to their shielded tailpipes.

  Firing a clanship’s defensive lasers, plasma beams, or anti-missiles at the seekers would serve to better identify their stealthed locations, both to human ground weapons and to space borne ship batteries that might be in position to target them. At the speed of light, those beams would surely hit them because maneuvering was useless. High velocity turns was one way to stay a step ahead of the prediction logic of enemy fire control when they couldn’t see you, but that was not as effective if the ship were hemmed in by high terrain. One alternative was to land early and out of position, another was to try to take out the incoming missiles at the last possible moment, risking some proximity blast damage before a rushed landing.

  Gofdar ordered his weapons master and pilot to do the latter. He had selected the wider, more vital central pass for his own clanship to blockade, and setting an example for precision and efficiency was important to him. He wanted to be positioned perfectly for the force aboard his craft to meet and stop the enemy. It was their misfortune, and two seekers using the wider mountain pass to their advantage, that caused him to fall short of his landing target, and he met the enemy sooner than he’d expected.

  “Two seekers locked.” Was the weapons master’s terse remark, as he fired the two lasers that could bear on the closer missile, and the one plasma cannon that could target the other one, along with two hypervelocity anti-missiles. The two seeker warhead explosions were closer than the Weapons Master planned, due to the pilot being forced to make a turn around a cliff outcrop that briefly blocked his targeting. The seekers closed rapidly, just as agile as the clanship in this situation.

  There was a loud clang of multiple impacts on the aft part of the hull as the large warheads scoured the clanship when they detonated, mere yards short and above the bell housing of the main thruster. The pilot had a moment when he thought the thruster housing had split, or a piece had blown off
, because the blast wave shoved the back of the craft down slightly, as if thrust were escaping laterally, pushing the tail down. He was able to correct with attitude thrusters, and those on the command deck decided there was no serious damage. So naturally, that was when the serious damage arrived.

  The two warhead’s detonations not only had located the clanship’s position along the canyon, but the shrapnel had chipped and scoured part of the aft stealth coating on the side exposed to the sky. The pilot, in his effort to compensate for the brief nose up thrust vector, which threatened to lift them above the ridge tops, hadn’t rotated the clanship to position hypothetically unstealthed hull surface away from space born radar.

  Some of Admiral Foxworthy’s heavy cruisers were almost overhead in orbit, called in response to the Krall clanship launches, and linked to the PDC’s detection grid. The location of the seeker detonation tracking signals, combined with reception of a weak fast moving reflection in the same vicinity was enough. The ship’s AI was already released to react and fire faster than a human could command, and it fired two heavy plasma beams on the suspected clanship target. It scored two hits. Not fatal, due to some atmospheric attenuation, but serious enough to farther damage the clanship’s hull and disable two attitude thrusters.

  The pilot reacted instantly and brilliantly this time. He triggered target decoys, and flipped the clanship end for end in the narrow confines of the canyon. This served multiple purposes. The reversal removed the now radar reflective hull segments from view from space, provided a wicked thrust reversal to slow their passage along the canyon, and placed undamaged attitude thrusters where he could use them to go vertical, to drop for a hurried landing.

  The follow up plasma beams from the heavy cruiser passed through the space the clanship would have occupied a mere two seconds later if it had not flipped, and the beams took out both of the target decoys. They obligingly spewed out highly radar reflective debris, and made a fireball by exploding containers of thruster fuel. The fireball and smoke furnished another benefit for the clanship, because it briefly obscured the near crash landing, as the landing jacks barely absorbed the impact as all thrusters shut down.

  Gofdar stabbed a talon to open only one of the four bottom hatches, the one facing the closer cliff wall. He used his com set to order every warrior away from the ship except the weapons master. He didn’t need to explain to that warrior why he had to stay aboard. The clanship’s weapons were of value to hold onto this valley if the enemy didn’t spot and destroy the grounded craft from orbit. As soon as every warrior was out, the hatch would be closed, to recover as much stealth capability as possible. The open hatch was less visible on radar when it faced a rock wall.

  The pilot preceded Gofdar over the railing of the command deck, ignoring the stairwell in haste. The eighteen-foot drop was trivial in Poldark’s gravity, and they raced down through the other decks and out the open portal in less than fifteen seconds. Gofdar slapped the keypad to close the hatch as he leaped clear.

  Once away, and his warriors spread among the cover of boulders near the side of the valley, Gofdar paused to examine the clanship. It had not yet ruptured into an orange fireball from incoming heavy plasma cannon fire, or from more missiles. He saw that the damaged section of the clanship stealth coating was well below the bulge of the midsection, in its shadow, and the pilot had rotated the craft to position the exposed hull scrapes closest to the nearby steep ridge face, not exposed to orbital radar from directly overhead. The upper electromagnetic stealth capability was still effective. Of course, their body armor also had stealth mode active, otherwise a couple of thousand warriors would be extremely noticeable.

  “I think the humans will not detect us from space. An efficient landing.” That came as close to outright praise as the sub leader would give to the pilot, who already knew he’d done a masterful bit of flying and positioning of the craft.

  The pilot, Fordol, offered the information from his last vision of the sensors and navigational screen, depicting the other seven clanships. “My leader, we are closer to the approaching human forces than any of the other clanships. The humans did not retreat as far as we thought. Our sensors displayed at least six clanships were still flying, to reach the selected blocking points. Kadrot’s clanship, the one most to the north, was not seen on my display. Either they were destroyed or there were too many ridges between us for the signal.”

  The best strategy was to consider that clanship lost, and that the small northern pass was open. This was something the humans would know if they had destroyed that particular blocking force. Using his battlefield memory of the terrain, something all of his warriors had studied before embarking, every warrior knew exactly where they needed to go. “The small northern passage splits from this main route, but deeper into the higher mountains. We can block that escape path if we reach that place before the humans can all pass through. They will be forced to move slower. We will need to move fast.” Left unsaid was the fact that they would have to face the bulk of the retreating human forces alone. This could prove to be a great battle, mentioned in the histories.

  After a brief communication with his weapons master, the force of over two thousand twenty armored warriors slung their plasma rifles, and started running west at nearly twenty miles per hour. The powered armor actually slowed them down slightly, but the added assistance and suit cooling would keep them fresher when they arrived. With stealth active, they were like a ripple of translucent waves splitting around boulders, and coursing along the cleared sides of the valley’s central four-lane roadway. They had what amounted to just over fifteen miles to cover.

  ****

  Greeves and Reynolds were deposited at a hidden tunnel entrance in a box canyon in the southern foothills of the Small Urals, as they were generally called on Poldark. Thanking the shuttle pilot for the ride, Reynolds triggered a hidden opening in the canyon as the shuttle lifted.

  As they walked down a ramp to the tunnel they planned to use, the interior lights activated. Sarge checked his suit’s built in navigation system and map. “My visor map shows there’s an underground parking area at the end of this tunnel, less than a quarter mile away. We might find an electric cart or ground car there. We still have over five miles to travel to reach the command hub below the central peak.”

  Dim light strips automatically switched on ahead of them, glowing softly as they went down the ramp. Their own ripper low light adaptation would have allowed them to see very well, although the suit visors offered map projections, sensor readings, and time and distance measurements. When they reached the wide place in the tunnel for parking vehicles they saw they were in luck.

  “We have two electric carts, both are charged,” Sarge noted as he looked over the two squad sized elongated carts, parked over inductive floor charging plates. Greeves had ignored them, walking to where the garage down ramp would lead up to the valley roadway. He stopped between a four wheeled ground car, and a rounded tracked vehicle, with a vertical pointing plasma gun on its back section.

  “Sarge, you ever see one of these? How fast is it compared to a cart or ground car?”

  “Those are new to me, but I saw some on the remote monitors of the street fighting in each of the cities. I heard them called ladybugs. They should be as fast as the ground car in the smooth floor tunnel, and faster than a cart. Why?”

  “I like that three barrel plasma gun on the rear swivel mount. Do you know how they work? We might like a bigger gun than our suit weapons when we get to where we’re going.”

  “Let me link to the local network. You can do it too.” He walked over to the nearest glow strip on a sidewall and touched it with his gauntlet. His suit AI used the authorization Caldwell had uploaded to their suits, and Reynolds was connected to the central AI at the spec ops command hub. After that, he could step away and remain linked now that he was identified.

  Thad duplicated the action, and instantly saw an axillary link indictor glowing in a corner of his visor display. “How�
�d you know to do that?”

  “Duh. This is a new type of armor I’m wearing, but it ain’t the first set I’ve ever worn in these type tunnels. I assumed the com protocol was placed in our suit AIs, along with our authorizations from Caldwell. Now we can download an operation manual for a ladybug.”

  In seconds, they had the operator’s manual, which had considerable pictorial help. Greeves touched a spot near a narrow split in the rounded hump in the back, and the clamshell opened smoothly, revealing the weapon support column, a fusion bottle, and racks of feeder ammunition rods, for generating the plasma bolts for each of the three gun barrels.

  Reaching in, Greeves touched the activation stud, and the weapon came alive. The clustered gun barrels lowered to horizontal aimed directly to the front, instantly linked to his suit AI. He saw that the sight recital showed the wall ahead, where the barrels were aimed, with the gun in safe mode. Checking the manual, he realized he could lock the barrel to his own vision, and aim wherever he chose to look. His AI handled the coordinate translation for the powered gun mount. He looked around the garage, aiming the sight at various points. It was fast and responsive. All he needed to do to fire was to think the trigger command to his suit. That, and shove three of the four foot long metal rods into the waiting slots that fed the three laser vaporization chambers.

  “I like it. Let’s take this for our ride.”

  “You want to drive or ride in back?” Reynolds asked.

  “Why split up?” Thad asked. “Either of us can control the cannon from a mile away, so why not both sit up front?”

  Sarge considered the operator manual pictures. “With our smaller form fitting suits I think we’d both fit in the front cab. The PU body armor is too bulky for that, but we’ll still be a bit crowded. However, the gunner needs to shove in reload rods from in back.”